2025 – 26 Education Impact Report: 10 Years of Learning Ecosystems Northeast

During the 2025 – 26 school year, our education team continued to advance an integrated approach to learning in the classroom, lab, field, and beyond. This year carried extra meaning as we marked 10 years of Learning Ecosystems Northeast (LENE), a milestone reflecting a decade spent building community among educators across the region. Alongside that anniversary, we continued expanding access to hands-on learning experiences that strengthen climate and STEM literacy, and provided formal and informal educators with the professional development, curriculum resources, and networks they need to bring authentic science into their own classrooms and learning spaces.

Every priority in our 2025 – 2030 Strategic Plan depends on the same starting point — an educated public. Whatever the initiative, from adapting our fisheries to building climate-ready communities, that foundation is built early, in classrooms and libraries and community science projects, long before a student ever considers a career on the working waterfront or in ocean science. Our education programming is where that groundwork gets laid.

LabVenture

LabVenture sets students on the path of scientific discovery, building their confidence, competence, and curiosity as young researchers. The program invites early middle school students from across Maine to our Cohen Center for Interactive Learning, where they step into the role of scientist for a day, working hands-on with real Gulf of Maine data. This year, we again prioritized equitable access to STEM education, hosting every fifth grade classroom in Portland Public Schools, every sixth grade classroom in Lewiston Public Schools, and students from Indian Township, extending our reach into more of Maine's Wabanaki communities. Free transportation remained available to every participating public school, keeping the program within reach for rural communities across the state.

This school year marks LabVenture's 20th anniversary, two decades of hands-on science learning for Maine students. Since launching with "Mystery of the X-Fish" in 2005, the program has reached more than 175,000 students across the state. As we celebrate this milestone, we're also looking ahead. The LabVenture team continues to reimagine the program's curriculum and delivery, ensuring it keeps pace with the needs of Maine classrooms for the next 20 years.

Wayfinder Wisdom

Our Wayfinder award winner, Jennifer Labonte, knows how important programs like LabVenture are for helping students think and feel like real scientists.

Community Science

For science learning to stick, students need to see it show up in their own backyard. Our Community Science program makes that connection real, supporting educators as they lead students through hands-on investigations of the ecosystems right outside their classroom door.

This year, students carried out field investigations and stewardship work across a range of local ecosystems, contributing real data to ongoing research in their communities. In one project, Protecting Ash, students partnered with foresters and community members to track the health of brown ash trees threatened by the invasive emerald ash borer. Students at schools like Windham High School turned their research into something their whole community could see, building and installing signage along the trail to share what they'd learned.

Findings from the Field

Findings from the Field is a peer-reviewed journal built entirely around student research, giving middle and high schoolers a real venue to design investigations, collect data, and publish original environmental science. Since its 2017 launch, the program has grown into a community of student scientists and educators spanning Maine and New Hampshire.

This year, we published Findings: Volume 9 and, in March, welcomed 106 students, along with educators and professional scientists, to the Findings Research Symposium at Unum. GMRI Chief Impact Officer Dave Reidmiller opened the day with a reminder that "science is a team sport," a theme that carried through as students presented their research alongside high schoolers and working scientists. For some students, the research led to real-world impact. Students in Old Orchard Beach identified the invasive hemlock woolly adelgid in their community and shared their findings with the Maine Forest Service, contributing to ongoing efforts to manage its spread.

Scientist To Go

Scientist To Go connects students with working scientists through a virtual lecture series, offering a window into scientific fields and career paths they might not otherwise encounter in the classroom. This year, students heard from both our own scientists and researchers from partner organizations, gaining a broader sense of the range of people and paths behind real scientific work.

Learning Ecosystems Northeast

Our education team knows that young people learn science best when they can explore it in more than one place, in the classroom, in their community, and everywhere in between. For 10 years, that idea has shaped our investment in Learning Ecosystems Northeast (LENE), a partnership of organizations that equips educators across the Northeast with the tools, knowledge, and community to build inclusive, place-based, data-driven STEM learning experiences. Through LENE's network of Connected Learning Ecosystems (CLEs), we bring educators together to learn from and with each other, sharing resources, ideas, and experience across formal and informal learning settings.

What started as a handful of educators building communities in Maine has grown into a Northeast-wide network of schools, libraries, science centers, and nonprofits, all working toward the same goal of building climate literacy in their communities, and giving young minds opportunities to engage in authentic science. To mark this milestone, we're sharing the story of Sherri Calhoun, an educator who has grown alongside LENE since its earliest days. Her journey captures what almost a decade of this network has built for educators across the region, a lasting community centered on a shared commitment to STEM and climate learning. For more educator perspectives on what LENE has meant to their teaching practice, visit our story on the impact of LENE.

Appendix: Our Education Supporters

Our work is only possible because of the federal, corporate, and foundation partners listed below, alongside the individual donors whose generosity sustains our education programs year after year. We're grateful to each of them.